When an application program that contains one or more defects is distributed to application users, the defects might cause an unexpected termination during the execution of the program or process. Tools and procedures have been developed to assist computer administrators and application developers with the analysis of such an unexpected termination. The provided information usually includes a stack trace describing frames that represent the program stack.
A stack trace is a human-readable report of the active frames at a certain point in time during the execution of a program. A stack trace allows for the tracking of the sequence of nested functions or procedures that were called up to the point where the stack trace is generated. A frame is representation of a function or a procedure that can be mapped to a program source code. A program stack is a listing of programs, functions, or procedures that have been executed up until the unexpected termination of the program and are arranged in the form of a stack.